


Ghosts

by palacearcade



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Gen, Mileven, Post-Season/Series 03, Separation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 14:09:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20836766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palacearcade/pseuds/palacearcade
Summary: Why are we haunted by a sense of loss?





	Ghosts

Mike Wheeler stepped into the cabin.

The weather-stained boards beneath his sneakers groaned to life, having already grown used to the vacancy. They were coated in a thick layer of dirt and dead October leaves, caused by the holes in the ceiling and walls. The sun leaked in from these cavities and exposed the shadows of dormant figures, cold and lonesome, much like how he felt. It was a remote sensation, something fragmented and raw—grief in the sickest form, an incurable disease, and it was festering in the cage of his chest.

Eleven wasn’t just a person to him; she was everything.

Coming here was the closest thing to her, though none of it compared. The overturned furniture and debris about the space of what had been a living room lay untouched, ridden of the sentiment it used to have, nothing more than wreckage now. Once-upright shelves were against the floor, their contents spilled below. Board games, mostly. Springfield. Score Four. Password. Things Hopper had liked and wanted El to like, too (and she did, though not as much as she let on).

_But it wasn’t her_.

The last time he’d been here, the place had been a blur of blood and monstrous rot. Screaming, crying. Defeat. _Fear_. Mike recalled it vividly, despite not wanting to. It was still in the air, carrying a solitary weight all its own, unavoidable. He stared at the ruins in utter disbelief that they’d fought something and killed it—that _El_ had killed it. Most days it was a distant thought, but now it pressed perilously against the front of his mind, trying to escape and unfold. Like many other things, this thought was a ghost—he never realized it was there until it was haunting him.

Near the fallen shelf and mess of board games was a television, covered in a grimy film. Mike stared at it for a while, caught, the memories of horror ever more fleeting. The reflection was gray and emotionless, a warped impression of truth that he refused to understand the reality of, uncertain of what that was in the first place. The world he knew was already colorless and unsympathetic, yet occasionally still bright and full of life. However, those moments were increasingly hard to find. The only brightness he’d known for the past two years was gone, taken away once more. There was no telling when he’d get to hold her again, feel her fingers intertwine with his, or hear her laugh into his shoulder over a joke no one else had been told.

Joylessly, he kicked the screen with the tip of his sneaker, exhaled, and went into the kitchen. The curtain from the window above the sink had fallen, and there were dishes still on the counter and in the drying rack, endlessly waiting to be put away. Some had been broken; others were whole. The table where Hopper and El ate most of the time was standing, miraculously, with its chairs tucked under. It was the same as everything else, out-of-place and in lack of a presence.

Even abandoned, Mike still considered the cabin her home, the place she had been most comfortable when they weren’t together. He wondered—for the hundredth time that day, which was why he’d come—if anything had been left behind. A picture, or maybe an item of clothing; anything that belonged to El that he could hold on to and keep safe. However, with his luck, Joyce had gotten everything from that little back bedroom he’d come to know like the back of his hand.

In one breath, Mike reached out and grasped the doorknob.

He would never admit to it, but it wasn’t until he pushed the door open that he understood just how lifeless the place was, how forgotten. The cold struck him the most; it seeped through his skin and struck bones he wasn’t sure he had, weak as he started to feel. He had half-expected her to be there waiting for him, sitting on the edge of the bed, Supercomm in hand. But she wasn’t. The only thing that greeted him was an empty room—a dagger to the chest. The walls held their prominent pastel color, ever innocent, reminding him of times he would never see again beyond the backs of his eyes. It was a sinking feeling, that loneliness; inescapable. _Suffocating_. 

The bed was against the wall, stripped of blankets and sheets. The dresser was the same, displaying nothing but a dense coat of dust, undisturbed. The floor, which had once been home to a rug, was a somber brown now, barren. Mike could feel the bitterness through the soles of his shoes, like steel. Altogether, the room was bleak, an unfeeling void of stillness that was somehow unimaginable, yet right in front of him, real and lucid and desolate.

When he sat down, the mattress sank under his weight. He felt as if he’d stepped into an old episode of The Twilight Zone and everything was static, gray and miserable.

A vacant silence rang in his ears like a personal definition of mockery, and Mike couldn’t stand it; he craved her in the way that one craves air underwater, a feeling just as languishing as it is painful. And yet, there was nothing he could do about it.

He remembered all the times he’d been in this room. The first time, the last time, and everything in between. The kisses, sweet and soft; the moments where they laughed over anything, holding hands and pulling each other close to stifle the amusement; serious conversations, rare as they were, lying shoulder-to-shoulder. He thought that any moment now, Hopper was going to come running at the door, screaming about a lousy three-inch minimum. They’d have shuffled apart and let him through, only to be given a stern look of fatherly awareness before being reminded of what rules were. In a way, he missed that—he missed the sentiment; the rush; the rebellion.

He missed Hopper, too, as weird as it was to think about. The little moments he never stopped to consider after they took place came to mind—Hopper trusting him with El when they went out, asking him how school was going, or if he was okay. The last words— “_Be careful._” It hadn’t been those that’d rushed from the depths of his mind during the funeral as the casket was lowered into the ground, but rather the moments of ridicule and taunt; the name-calling. Asshole. Piece of shit. Stupid. Mike had shared all those names with El, who’d laughed without really caring that it was her father they were talking about. He felt awful for it that day, and he felt awful for it now, perhaps more mortified than before.

Mike wondered if El felt the same way about moving, about not being in the only place she’d ever known. He wondered if she felt numb to it all, or if she was just going through the motions to keep from thinking about the obvious, walking around as though nothing was wrong. If she was hurt or upset, especially. And in the back of his mind, it was hard not to wonder if she felt responsible for everything, too.

Even though not one bit of it was her fault.

In an instant, everything fell forward. That hollow feeling in his chest had come back, all at once and terrifying. It ripped the air from his lungs, violently, and when he became aware of his surroundings again, he found it hard to catch his breath.

He gasped once, and all that followed was a strange, choked sob. The lack of sun in the room, pale as it was in October, made him all the more vulnerable—so vulnerable that he felt bare. This vulnerability was inhumane and ravenous, and it coursed through his veins like ice water, left him against the floor, exposed and full of an ache that he was sure no other person could understand. His mother had said she did when he’d come home the day before, but he knew she didn’t. She’d seen the grief and the emptiness in her son, but she hadn’t suffered through it.

Everything within a human body is capable of healing, but the only thing that seemed irrecoverable to Mike was the pain caused by a broken heart. In some way, he thought, it was true—not even time could heal it.

But El could. Of that, he was sure. He had to tell himself that she wasn’t gone this time, not really, because if he didn’t, he was going to believe otherwise.

And, slowly, it would have killed him.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'll say that I wrote this almost two months ago, yet never published it. It's a rough one, so I apologize if there are mistakes. I feel like I cut it off too soon, or maybe forgot something? Maybe that's just me. Anyway, tell me what you think!


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